Bad mozilla/Xprint interactions on Debian homepage: decisions nee ded
Some problems have been reported printing our home page, www.debian.org from
mozilla (or firefox) using Xprint (xprt-xprintorg), see bugs #235592,
#251067.
With the combination of latest versions (firefox 0.9.3-2, Xprint
0.0.9.final.001-3 (upstream 009.001), www.debian.org is printed with the
main text rendered as sans-serif not serif, with spaces between words
removed. I believe the same occurs with mozilla proper. The problem seems
to occur when the font is not explicitly defined in the web page (other
pages print fine).
It is not clear if the problem is really firefox's or Xprint's. If I
downgrade to the preceding upstream version (Debian 0.0.9.final-3, upstream
v009), then the page appears to print correctly.
On the other hand, if I define a default stylesheet for firefox, then it
again prints fine, under the latest Xprint. The stylesheet is
userContent.css (copied from userContent-example.css) and must go into
~/.firefox/default/<user-specific>/chrome. The minimal patch required seems
to be
@media print {
body {
font-family: times, serif;
}
tt, pre {
font-family: courier, monospace;
}
}
("times" is required, "serif" on its own is not sufficient).
If upstream (or someone else!) can supply a proper patch to Xprint or
mozilla quickly enough, so that this style patch is not required, then fine.
Otherwise we have two options:
1) Use the older Xprint version 0.0.9.final-3 in sarge (add appropriate
patches to improve it for I18N etc). This will lose whichever improvements
upstream made between v009 and v009.001.
2) Apply the above stylesheet patch to the mozillas. This means either
(a) asking users to add it themselves into
~/.[mozilla|firefox]/default - not terribly convenient for them, or
(b) renaming the original file
/usr/lib/mozilla/defaults/profile/chrome/userContent-example.css
to .../userContent.css and including the patch, which will then (I presume)
be used by all new users.
Personally I'm in favour of 2b, based on the assumption there was a good
reason why upstream released Xprint 009.001 (read the release notes at
http://xprint.mozdev.org/releases/index.html#009_001).
Normally I would wait for a proper well thought-through fix from upstream,
or coordinate with the firefox/mozilla coordinators. I have logged the
problem with Xprint upstream at
http://xprint.freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1112
But given we are about to release sarge, and it would be a shame if our most
popular web browser had issues printing our own web page, I figured it would
be appropriate to bring the matter before the whole project first.
I await your feedback.
Drew
p.s. In the interest of saving the trees, you can test the problem by
printing to file and viewing with gv.
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